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Thursday, 31 May 2012

Three trade union leaders were detained by Swaziland police
as a public transport strike entered its second day.

The three, executive committee members of the Swaziland
Transport and Allied Workers Union (STAWU), were locked in a cell all day at Mafutseni
Police Station.

They were picked up by 15 officers close to their union
offices in Manzini, the main commercial city in Swaziland.

One of the detained men, Petros Ndzabandzaba, chief
negotiator of STAWU, told local media they were on their way to an arranged
meeting with police Regional Commander Richard Tsabedze when they were picked
up.

Transport workers in Swaziland were on their second day
of a strike that has brought much of the public transport out of Manzini to a
halt. Workers are protesting about being forced to use a new bus rank in
Manzini that has led to a reduction in passengers.

The Swazi Observer,
a newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last
absolute monarch, reported police released the three men without charges after seven hours
following a request from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security Minister.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

A university student in Swaziland was shot with a live
bullet by police following campus disturbances, human rights activists report.

The 23-year-old student at the Limkokwing private
university in Mbabane was reportedly an innocent victim of the shooting.

The Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) said, ‘The student
was on his way to his dormitory when he was struck by the live bullet in his
leg.’

SSN reported, ‘According to
witnesses, one policeman claimed to have been hit by a stone. In retaliation,
one of his colleagues let out a shot in the direction of the student who was
walking
past the police contingent.’

Linkokwing has been the scene of disturbances for more than
a week as students protested against lack of equipment such as computers,
laptops and cameras, at the university.

Authorities closed the university, but it reopened
yesterday, but some students are boycotting classes.

The student was taken to hospital where he was treated
for his wounds.

The Times of
Swaziland, reporting the same
incident, said the student was hit with a rubber bullet, ‘which was lodged below
the knee of his right leg’. It said the student bled profusely and the bullet
was extracted at the hospital.

Sunday, 27 May 2012

There have been posts on Facebook recently about the
standards of newspaper journalism in Swaziland and whether comment writers need
to abide by ethical codes.

Some people are saying writers of ‘my opinion’ pieces aren’t
‘journalists’, so the ethical rules that apply to full-time employees of
newspapers don’t apply to them. This isn’t the case.

The word ‘journalist’ covers a multitude of newspaper
tasks and not just news reporting. So, feature writers, opinion writers,
photographers, the people who write the headlines, the editors, and so on are
all ‘journalists’.The term applies to
people whether they work full-time for a media house or only contribute the
occasional piece. It doesn’t matter if comment writers have day-jobs somewhere
else: when they write for the newspapers they are ‘journalists’ and they are
expected to stick to the rules like everyone else.

Some Facebook posters also think that comment writers are
allowed to say anything they want and it doesn’t necessarily have to be true,
because it’s the writer’s own ‘opinion’.

That isn’t true. Comment writers have to abide by the
same laws and ethical codes as anyone else. Take the defamation (libel) law,
for example, that protects people from false attacks on their character. Suppose
a comment writer says in his column that a person he names was sacked from his
job, even though this isn’t true. When he is accused of libel it’s no use him
telling the court, ‘It was an honestly-held opinion’. It was not true (even if
the writer thought it was, but did not check his facts) and he and the newspaper that published the article
would have to pay damages to the person libelled.

Libel laws differ from country to country, and many of
them allow that writers should be allowed to have opinions, but there are
limits. If a writer were to be accused of libel, the main defence he might have
would be that what was written was ‘fair comment’ or ‘honestly believed’. But,
for this defence to succeed, the writer must show that the comment was made
without malice or disregard for the truth.

The Swaziland National Association of Journalists (SNAJ)
code of ethical conduct says something on this.Article 12 on separating
comment from facts states, ‘While free to take positions on any issue,
journalists shall draw a clear line between comment, conjecture and fact.’

SNAJ also has this to say about facts. ‘The duty of every
journalist is to write and report, adhere to and faithfully defend the truth. A
journalist should make adequate inquiries, do cross-checking of facts in order
to provide the public with unbiased, accurate, balanced and comprehensive
information.’

So, opinion writers must beware – they have no special
privileges and must stick to the same rules as all other journalists.

It would take seven-out-of-ten Swazis at least three
years to earn the price of the shoes trimmed with jewels worn by one of King
Mswati III’s 13 wives at a lunch in the UK.

Inkhosikati LaMbikiza, the King’s first wife, wore shoes
that cost £995 (US$1,559) to a lunch hosted by the UK’s Queen Elizabeth II to
mark her Diamond Jubilee, earlier this month (May 2012).

Her shoes were described by reporters as a ‘rather
eye-catching pair of Pearly Queen-style shoes with feathery pom-poms on the
toes and heels.’ They were trimmed with jewels, sequins and feathers.

She also wore a black and white spotted dress with
feathery trimmings to match her shoes and a grey clutch bag.

The King is regularly criticised in media across the
globe for his extravagant lifestyle. Media in Swaziland, where King Mswati is
sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, dare not criticise him. Last week
the Times of Swaziland, the only
independent daily newspaper in the kingdom, featured a report about LaMbikiza’s
shoes, gushing that she had received ‘rave reviews’ for her dress sense while
in the UK.

In Swaziland, seven-in-ten of King Mswati’s subjects are
so poor they cannot afford shoes of any kind. They earn less than US$2 a day
and it would take them at least 779 working days, or three years, to earn the
price of LaMbikiza’s shoes.

While more than half of Swaziland’s 1.1 million
population rely on some form of food aid to keep them from hunger, King Mswati
has 13 palaces in Swaziland, one for each of his wives; fleets of BMW and
Mercedes cars and at least one Rolls Royce. Last month, for his 44th birthday
he received a private jet worth US$17 million as a gift. He refused to reveal
who bought it for him, leading to speculation that it was paid for out of
public funds.

The cost of the King’s five-day trip to the UK for the
Diamond Jubilee has been estimated to be at least US$794,500.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has followed the IMF’s lead and withdrawn
support for Swaziland.

The AfDB will not pay US$100 million (E800 million) budget support due
to the kingdom, because Swaziland has failed to tackle problems with its
economy.

Last month (April 2012), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) withdrew
support for the Swazi Government’s plan for financial recovery, because
Swaziland had failed to reign in public spending and had presented a national
budget that took money away from education and poverty reduction and diverted
it to other areas, widely understood to include spending on King Mswati III,
sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

Majozi
Sithole, Swaziland’s Finance Minister, said this week that the AfDB would not
pay the annual E800 million budget support it had promised over three years because
the government had not met targets it agreed with the IMF.

Sithole said that the government was now hoping to reduce its annual
public service salary bill by E300 million, but he said this would be difficult
as the government had already failed in a previous attempt to cut it by E241
million.

The Swazi Government would have received a ‘letter of comfort’ from the
IMF if it had been able to control its economy, thereby enabling it to get
loans from the AfDB and the World Bank.